To boldly split infinitives...

Got in trouble from one of the teachers today. She was complaining about something in the textbook, approaching me, in my lunch break, like she was a headmistress and I'd just done something really bad and earned a detention.

It was a definition in the text book we'd made: "run out of (verb)" had been defined as "to not have any more of something". Now I know it's not the most elegant of definitions, but I think it is far from horrific, and totally unworthy of the kind of reaction it received. Looking at it carefully, as I presume everyone making the book had done as it was doing the proof-reading rounds, it appears to be a split infinitive. Now there is a horrifically large number of people who think that infinitives should not be split, even though the same people will split infinitives with gay abandon in their daily speech and probably in a lot of their writing.

"But what if they have an exam?" asked the teacher, concerned for her students' welfare. Well, if the exam considered split infinitives wrong, then it's out of touch with the realities of the English language in the twentieth century.

This is just a prescriptive versus descriptive grammar problem. The rationale behind split infinitives being wrong is that it doesn't happen in Latin, and back in the seventeenth century when they started writing grammars, and trying to tell people how they should use their own language, and deciding what was and was not correct, Latin was the language whose grammar had been most studied, and that was the grammar that was considered correct, even for English. And in Latin infinitives cannot be split. Neither can conjunctions be used to end sentences with. The reason you are not allowed to ever split infinitives in Latin is that Latin infinitives are made up of one word. The English infinitive, on the other hand, is made up of two words. The first is "to". It's easy to split, but may not be wise, in certain circumstances. One circumstance is if you are going to put a clause in the middle of a sentence and risk the reader not following your meaning. This is likely to seriously, infuriatingly and possibly even critically prevent them from following your meaning. Having said that, it doesn't seem to always cause problems.

As for recommendations to teachers faced with a split infinitive in a text book, I suppose there are three choices. First, teach that it is a mistake and that it should be corrected, because to casually split infinitives is a crime that needs to seriously be addressed. This may cause some problems with students who take this rule literally and then start noticing that many native speakers split infinitives, and begin to wonder how it is that native speakers get things wrong and they get things right, but they still can't really follow what's going on, and nobody thinks their English is that good.

Second is a more comprehensive answer. The teacher could teach students about prescriptive and descriptive grammar explaining that there are sets of simple rules that are used by teachers to try to explain language, but real languages doesn't actually follow these rules, choosing instead a much more complex path that nobody has ever fully explained or codified, although people are constantly churning out extra explanations, modifications to old explanations and condemnations of obsolete ones. Also it would be possible to explain why the definition began "To not have..." rather than "Not to have..." as the former defines a verb while the latter defines an adjective and a state.

The third, and perhaps most appealing is just to get on with it and focus on the meaning rather than the grammar, after all "to", "not", "have" and all the other words in the definition are pretty common and the students should be able to work out what it means.

Having initially defended my position and balked at the idea of it being a mistake, with hindsight, I think we should have avoided this sentences, probably by using a different vocabulary item. The main reason is that there are some people out there who believe very strongly, in fact possibly as strongly as I believe they are misguided, that infinitives should not be split. These are the kinds of people who make grammar tests and read carefully-written writing. Avoiding splitting infinitives is wise just to stop pissing them off.